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Happiness

JONATHAN LEAR

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Delivered at

Clare Hall, CambridgeNovember 29 and 30, 1999

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor atthe University of Chicago, where he is a member of the Committee onSocial Thought and the Department of Philosophy. He was educated atYale, Cambridge, and the Rockefeller University. Before coming toChicago, Professor Lear taught at Cambridge, where he was fellow anddirector of studies in philosophy at Clare College, and at Yale where hewas the Kingman Brewster Professor of the Humanities. During thetime he was teaching at Yale, Lear trained as a psychoanalyst at theWestern New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is now on theteaching faculty at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His booksinclude Aristotle and Logical Theory (1980); Aristotle: The Desire to Under-stand (1988); Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretationof Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990); Open Minded: Working Out the Logic ofthe Soul (1998); and most recently, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder ofLife (2000).

1.

What difference does psychoanalysis make to our understanding of hu-man existence? I have been living with this question for years, and inthis lecture I want to begin to give an answer. These are the Tanner Lec-tures on Human Values, so I should on this occasion like to focus on thequestion of what difference psychoanalysis makes to our understandingof our life with values, in particular, of our life with ethical values.

Psychoanalysis teaches us that wish, if not hope, springs eternal.Here is a wishful thought that comes quickly to mind when we begin tothink about psychoanalysis and ethics. Might it not be possible to ex-pand our understanding of ethical life to take account of the fact thathuman beings live with unconscious motivations? The idea would be touse psychoanalysis to devise a more humane ethics—one that consid-ered humans more fully and realistically before saying how they shouldlive. The prospect might then open for some kind of reconciliation of in-dividual human desire with the needs of society and civilization.

The tradition I am concerned with grounds ethical life in the devel-opment and expression of character. Perhaps the greatest achievementin this tradition lies at its origin—in Aristotle’s ethics. For Aristotle,character is a developmental and psychological achievement. We arehabituated into certain character formations by our parents, family, andteachers, who get us to act in certain ways repeatedly, before we canunderstand the reasons for doing so. We thereby develop certain stablepsychic dispositions—to see and think about the social environment incertain ways and to act accordingly. This is our “second nature.” Now,for Aristotle, certain character-formations are better than others. Thosethat facilitate the living of a full, rich, meaningful life—a happy life—are the human excellences, or virtues.

The attraction of this character-based approach is that it purports toaccount for ethical life in terms of the lived realities of human motiva-tion and judgment. Consider, for example, human kindness.1 This char-acter-trait is not on Aristotle’s own list of the virtues, but we do not haveto stick to that list to preserve the overall ethical spirit. A kind person

[209]

1 See John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

will have a distinctive sensitivity to the world—and a special sort ofmotivation to act. To be truly kind, one needs to be able to distinguish asituation in which one ought to step in and help someone who is strug-gling, from a superŠcially similar situation in which one should stepback and allow the struggling person to develop the requisite skills andsense of autonomy. A kind person will be sensitive to that difference—and in noticing that difference will thereby be motivated to act in theappropriate ways. On this character-based approach, there is no way tospecify, in a particular set of circumstances, what is the kind thing to doindependently of the judgment of a kind person.

Already the hope of an expanded Aristotelianism is coming intoview. After all, if ethical life is an expression of character, and characteritself can be shaped by the psychologically enlightened training of par-ents and teachers, why can we not include our understanding of the un-conscious in that training? We might then differ with Aristotle overwhat the best character-formations are—a happy life might come totake a different shape from the one he imagined—but the overall ap-proach would be Aristotelian in spirit.

It is a thesis of this lecture that such a project cannot work—and, incoming to see why not, we shall learn about the psychoanalytic uncon-scious and about the attempt to ground ethical life in character. In brief,I want to argue that the unconscious is too disruptive to be contained inany straightforward account of character-formation.

Ironically, this project of including the unconscious in ethical charac-ter-formation would be unassailable if psychoanalysis were one more sci-ence among others. On this normalized understanding, psychoanalysiswould be distinctive because of its hitherto unexplored subject matter,the unconscious. In opening up a new realm of inquiry, psychoanalysiswould be adding to our knowledge. On this conception, psychoanalysisis an extension of what philosophers tend to call “folk psychology.” Folkpsychology is the attempt to explain human action on the basis of beliefs,desires, and intentions to act. Indeed, its Šrst systematic exposition is inAristotle’s Ethics. Of course, the term “folk psychology” is somewhatunfortunate insofar as it suggests that these are the mental states peopleordinarily ascribe to each other before they are in the grip of some partic-ular psychological theory. In fact, the situation is almost the reverse.People regularly ascribe all sorts of complicated motivations and emo-tional states—including unconscious ones—to each other. And theyonly talk about “folk psychology” after they are in the grip of a philo-sophical theory about the elementary explanation of action. Neverthe-

210 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

less, one can see the idea that is at play: folk psychology would have to beexpanded to include unconscious wishes and fantasies along with beliefsand desires, but then we could formulate a character-based ethics de-signed to take account of the whole kit and caboodle.

But psychoanalysis is not another science in any normal sense: aboutthis, the critics are right. Indeed, it seems to me not just mistaken, butultimately complacent to treat it as such. For what psychoanalysis un-covers is not a new area of knowledge so much as something disturbingabout ourselves. Could there be a nondisturbing way of doing this? Bynow it is, perhaps, a too-familiar idea that in life we somehow keep theunconscious at a distance. The process that Freud called “making the un-conscious conscious” could not, he thought, be a straightforward dis-covery, but necessarily involved transformation of the soul. It alwaysinvolved uncovering something disturbing—and the uncovering alwaysoccurred under conditions of resistance and repression. Should the un-covering be so fraught in ordinary life, but theorizing about it bestraightforward? Or might the apparent straightforwardness of psycho-analytic theory itself be part of the covering over?2

But if in theory and in practice the unconscious is always being cov-ered over, it is also always already present and manifest in the coveringsover. It is this intuition I want to take back to the Šrst systematic at-tempt to work out a psychologically minded ethics. The question of thislecture then becomes not “What do we have to add to Aristotle?” but,rather, “What is already there in Aristotle’s ethics, disturbing the self-presentation, yet not quite conscious of itself?”

This question is of more than historical interest. For we live at a timewhen the promising approaches to ethics are broadly Aristotelian inspirit. Philosophical culture has grown weary of rule-based approachesto ethics. By now, the critiques of Kant’s attempt to ground morality onthe moral law are well known.3 In briefest outline, from the moral law itis impossible to derive any speciŠc conclusions about how to act in aspeciŠc set of circumstances. It is, in part, because this critique has be-come widely shared that there is a renewed interest in Aristotle. For

[Lear] Happiness 211

2 We owe to Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche the idea that the history of psychoanaly-sis can be read as a history of the resistance to its own insight. See Jean Laplanche, Life andDeath in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985);“The UnŠnished Copernican Revolution,” in Essays on Otherness (London and New York:Routledge, 1999); and Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psycho-analysis, 1954–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).

3 See, for example, Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Aristotle, it is precisely because it is impossible to specify a set of ruleson how to act well that one must turn to a psychologically informed ac-count of how to build good character.

Interestingly, this is an approach that Freud himself ignored. Freud’scritique of ethical value is itself addressed to a certain law-based inter-pretation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This interpretation focuseson the Ten Commandments, the Mosaic Law, the injunction to “Lovethy neighbor as thyself,” and so on. Freud was concerned with a certaininexorability of unconscious guilt that life within this ethical traditiontended to facilitate. Being brought up in the Law tended to produce inindividuals cruel superegos, set up over against the ego, judging itharshly and inšicting ever-greater punishments and inhibitions. Thiswas Freud’s diagnosis of life within civilization. But Freud more or lessequated life within the Law and life within the ethical, and he therebyoverlooked this alternative, Aristotelian approach.4 For Aristotle seemsto hold out the prospect of an ethics based on an integrated psyche inwhich values are harmoniously expressed in a genuinely happy life. Isthis, then, a real possibility that Freud simply ignored? It is strikingthat Freud turned to ancient Greece for its myths, but not for its ethicsor philosophy. Returning to Aristotle, thus, opens up the possibility ofa different type of psychoanalytical rešection on the ethical.

Of course, psychoanalysis is itself concerned with the returns we feelinclined to make. And there seems little doubt that in contemporaryphilosophical culture, the Nicomachean Ethics, whatever else it mightrepresent for us, has become a fantasy of origins. It is where we returnwhen we want to work our way back to the origins of an alternative tolaw-based approaches to ethics. And psychoanalysis teaches us to sus-pect that if there is a disturbance within the ethical, one ought to Šnd atleast hints of it at the origin. Certainly, the disturbance ought to begaining some expression in the fantasy of origin. So this ought to be areturn with a difference. The hope is to Šnd out more, not just aboutAristotle, but about ourselves in our previous goings-back. What havewe had to overlook in order to treat Aristotle as an origin? What doesn’tget seen in order to preserve the fantasy? In answering those questions,we may start to gain insight into the distinctive difference psychoanaly-sis makes.5


4 Interestingly, Freud seems blind to the ways the Aristotelian approach to the virtueswas itself taken up in the Christian tradition.

5 I also have a personal reason for going back to Aristotle. My life in Cambridge—whichstretched out over Šfteen years—was one of the great personal and intellectual experiences

2.

There is, I believe, reason to question the foundations of the Greek ethi-cal experience. One can glimpse the problem at the Šrst moment inwhich Aristotle invites us to participate in ethical rešection. For the veryŠrst sentence of The Nicomachean Ethics induces a rešective breakdown:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, isthought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightlybeen declared to be that at which all things aim. (Nicomachean Ethics[E.N.] I.1, 1094a1–3)6

As generations of commentators have noted, the inference is invalid.From the fact that every art, inquiry, action, or choice aims at somegood, it simply does not follow that there is one good at which all thingsaim. There has been no shortage of articles criticizing Aristotle—herethe oedipal struggle and the desire to get tenure converge—but are wereally to think that the founder of formal logic committed such a bla-tant fallacy? More insightful commentators assume that Aristotle couldnot be making such a blunder, and so there have also been ingeniousattempts to make this sentence come out right. I am not going to gothrough them all, but will take one example that I take to be among thebest attempts to make sense of this sentence: Aristotle is here trying tostate what the supreme good would be (if there were such).7 The problemfor this interpretation is that there is no textual indication that Aristotleis speaking hypothetically; indeed, he seems to emphasize that the good


of my life. It has certainly inšuenced everything that has gone since. Much of that timestudying and teaching was spent absorbed in a philosophical engagement with Aristotle.When I left Cambridge, I wrote a book summing up my intellectual experience—and Istopped reading Aristotle. I trained as a psychoanalyst, and when I wanted to read or teach aGreek philosopher, I turned to Plato. Now, as I return to Cambridge fourteen years later, Iam fascinated by the question of what it would be, for me, to return to Aristotle. For me tosee how my reading of him would now differ from my earlier readings would be to take ameasure of how I have changed—of what difference psychoanalysis has made to me. PerhapsI should note in passing that when I Šrst came to Cambridge there was no Philosophy Tri-pos. One read the Moral Sciences. What’s in a name? As we shall see this lecture: a lot andnothing. A lesson that emerges from these lectures is that psychoanalysis could never be in-cluded in the Moral Sciences—except as a limiting case, as that which disrupts the moralsciences—whereas it could be included as peculiar kind of mental activity that was properlycalled philosophical.

6 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea (E.N.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). English transla-tions, unless otherwise noted, are from The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).

7 See Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford and New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991), p. 9.

has “rightly been declared” (��s ��; my emphasis) to bethat at which all things aim. I suppose one can add “if there were such athing,” but it seems an interpretive stretch.

This looks like a dilemma: Either one accepts that Aristotle made alogical error in the opening sentence of his fundamental ethical work orone must make coherent sense of what he is saying. Rather than choose,however, I should like to shift the question away from what Aristotle issaying and ask instead what he is doing. I would like to suggest thatAristotle is here participating in a peculiar kind of inaugural instantia-tion. He is attempting to inject the concept of “the good” into our lives—and he thereby changes our lives by changing our life with concepts.

Aristotle does not do this on his own. For an inauguration to be suc-cessful there must be a context in which it occurs. The relevant contextin this case is the Greek philosophical effort—notably of Socrates andPlato—to found ethics as a form of practical-rational inquiry. ForSocrates, the fundamental question is “How shall one live?” OstensiblySocrates is asking a question, but ultimately it makes more sense to seehim as attempting to introduce a concept—the concept of a life—intolife. We are now challenged to consider our lives in deciding what to do.

Why think of this as the introduction of a concept rather than, say,an invitation to rešect with a concept we already possessed? It is nowpossible to glimpse the lineaments of the twentieth century’s legacy tophilosophy. One of the most signiŠcant contributions of this century tophilosophy—manifest in the work of the later Wittgenstein and of Hei-degger—is a working-through of the idea that there can be no viabledistinction between the existence of concepts and the lives we live withthem. There can be no fundamental divide between thought and life. Ifwe consider the confusion, anxiety, and anger that Socrates generated,there is little doubt that the Athenian citizens had, in Socrates’ time, noway to think about the question he was asking. Indeed, Socrates regu-larly confused himself. One has only to read the Charmides to see Socratesget himself into serious confusions as he tries to think about how tothink about one’s life. And in the Apology Socrates famously says that hediscovered the oracle that he was the wisest of men was right because ofhis peculiar ignorance. Although he did not know, at least he knew thathe did not know, and that lone made him wiser than anyone else. But ifno one knows the answers to the questions Socrates is asking—if, in-deed, no one really knows how to go about Šnding an answer—thenthere is reason to believe that Socrates is not asking well-deŠned ques-tions but is rather trying to introduce new ways of thinking and living.


This is the context, as elaborated by Plato, in which Aristotle injects “thegood” into our lives.

Aristotle takes himself to be merely extending the locus of our pre-existing concern with our lives. But remember the case in Wittgensteinof a person who takes himself to be going on in the same way with theinstruction “Add 2,” but who at some point in the series starts going onin what we take to be strange ways: 1004, 1008, 1012…8 We realize inhis bizarre goings-on that he hasn’t really grasped the concept—or thathe is operating with a different concept that we do not yet understand.Now look what happens to us when Aristotle invites us in the Šrst sen-tence to move from a concern for the various goods in our lives to a con-cern with the good: we are stumped, we need his lectures to teach us howto go on. From a Wittgensteinian perspective, this is evidence that,whatever he says he is doing, Aristotle is inducting us into a new wayof life.

Jacques Lacan and the later Wittgenstein have, each in his own way,argued that a successful inauguration will tend to obscure its own oc-currence. Lacan takes as an example the introduction of the concept ofirrational numbers.9 Once we have the concept of irrational numbers, itwill look as though they were always there, awaiting discovery. But ifwe take the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger seriously, this cannot beright, Life before the “discovery” of irrational numbers was not “miss-ing” anything. People lived with lengths; they lived with numbers. Thedecision to apply numbers to lengths changed our lives with numbersand lengths: it opened our lives to new possibilities, to new ways of liv-ing and thinking. For the later Wittgenstein it only looks as though theirrational numbers were already there, waiting to be discovered, becauseour lives with numbers have fundamentally changed. Retrospectively, itwill look as though earlier life without the concept of the irrational wasincomplete, missing something. But that is because we are now embed-ded in a life with the concept, and it has become difŠcult to see any ear-lier form of life as anything other than incomplete.

Now if we go back to the Šrst sentence of the Ethics, we can see an at-tempt to cover over its inaugurating nature. Aristotle himself says al-most nothing about goods or the good: his assertion is basically aboutwhat others have thought and said. “Every art…is thought to aim at


8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I.185–89 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1978).

9 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, pp. 15–21,256–57. See also S. G. Shanker, Wittgenstein and the Turning-Point in the Philosophy of Mathe-matics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

some good”: strictly, Aristotle is passing on some high-class gossip.Rhetorically, the claim presents itself as a certain kind of receivedknowledge—common knowledge of the right sort of group. Indeed,part of what it is to be in this group is to take it as obvious that this iswhat “is thought.” Notice the impersonality and passivity: “and for thisreason the good has…been declared†” No one in particular is doingthe declaring: impersonally, it is thus. No doubt, Aristotle’s audiencewould have thought of Plato—it is hardly a secret who has done the de-claring—but the sentence-construction pushes one away from the activ-ity of Plato’s activity and steers one in the direction of acceptingsomething as common knowledge. In particular, the sentence tends tokeep from explicit awareness that Plato’s own declaring might itselfhave been part of this inaugural instantiating activity. Aristotle entersexplicitly in his own voice only with the word “rightly”: “the good hasrightly been declared.” His own activity here is all but effaced. Noticetoo that the inference is constructed in such a way as to suggest thatthere is no real question whether there is any such thing as the good—itis presented as though it were always already there—the only questionis what it might be like. In these ways the performative activity embe-ded in this Šrst sentence is hidden from view.

If the performance had succeeded, the sentence would have lookedobviously true to us. Conversely, inaugural attempts will tend to drawattention to themselves when they misŠre. Instead of looking like it wasalways already there, waiting to be discovered, in a failed inaugural at-tempt something will look odd, as though it doesn’t Št in. This is whatis happening in Aristotle’s Šrst sentence: Aristotle does not quite suc-ceed in inaugurating “the good.” Perhaps it is a fact about us that we canno longer take this sentence as obvious; and if it is not obvious, it mustinevitably provoke some discomfort. It is worth getting clear aboutwhat is disturbing us.

In effect, Aristotle is trying to introduce the concept by means ofwhich it would make sense for humans to take a teleologically orientedinterest in their lives. For him, the birth of ethics as a serious rešectiveinquiry simply is the introduction of the concept of the good as the con-cept in terms of which one should rešectively evaluate one’s life. Aris-totle insists that this is of immense practical importance:

Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great inšuence on life? Should wenot, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what


we should. If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what itis. (E.N. I.2, 1094a22–25; my emphasis)

It should now be clear that for Aristotle’s act to succeed the audiencemust remain unaware of its inaugurating nature. For Aristotle is, ineffect, injecting the teleological into life, and that act cannot itself beunderstood in teleological terms. It is too strong to say that this insightis repressed. Nevertheless, to grasp the inaugurating aspect of this act isto bust open the form of knowing and living that it attempts to create.

One can now see how Aristotle could make his way effortlessly to theend of his Šrst sentence—and expect his intended audience to followalong. In the context of a teleological worldview, it makes sense to in-quire about the good for us. It is we who cannot follow along who are inthe less comfortable position of realizing that we can no longer live likethat. We can no longer live like that, in part, because we are no longerliving like that: thus our discomfort with the very Šrst sentence. Andthus our mild disquiet about what else might be opened up in thatrecognition. For once we become alive to the idea that Aristotle mightbe engaged in an inaugural act that, by its very nature, would tend tocover itself, the overall argument begins to look more suspicious.

Consider, for example, the ways Aristotle justiŠes his claim. Hepoints out that the goods we already recognize often form hierarchies.10

The design and making of a bridle, for example, is ultimately evaluatedby the contribution it makes to military victory. The suggestion seemsto be that we could keep on going. But once we become suspicious, it be-comes evident that there are signiŠcant asymmetries. First, in the famil-iar hierarchies, we already know what the master good is. In this case, itis military victory. Second, in these cases the master good already func-tions in determining the shape of the lesser goods. So, to continue the ex-ample, the goal of military victory does Šlter down and inšuence theshape of the bridles that are made. That is, the familiar hierarchies tendto work from the top down: the overarching and known good inšuences theshape of the lesser goods. Now Aristotle has suggested that, in consider-ing these familiar hierarchies, we could just keep going in order to formthe conception of a larger, all-encompassing hierarchy. But this is mov-ing from the bottom up—and Aristotle has given us no clue how to do this.It would seem we have been invited to move in the wrong direction.


10 E.N. I.1, 1094a4–18.

Aristotle goes on to argue that if there were not this Šnal goal, desirewould be vain:

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for itsown sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and ifwe do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for atthat rate the process would go on to inŠnity, so that our desire wouldbe empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.(E.N. I.2, 1094a18–22)

It is surprising that this argument has not caused more anxiety amongreaders. There is, of course, a reason for a fairly complacent reading: Weknow that the intended audience for these lectures are people who arewell brought up and mature.11 And we assume the lectures are intendedto produce some form of intellectual and practical comfort: “to thosewho desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledgeabout such matters will be of great beneŠt.”12 That is why we tend toread the second conditional—“and if we do not choose everything forthe sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to in-Šnity, so that our desire would be empty and vain [�� ]”—as offering a reductio ad absurdum. But suppose we don’tassume from the start that the absurd is impossible. That is, supposethrough a certain form of rešection we become aware that desire is in-herently slippery. Then this line of reasoning would open up the realpossibility that our desire is empty and vain. That is, this reasoningwould open us to anxiety.

Of course, the Šrst of Freud’s two major discoveries is that uncon-scious desire is inherently slippery. But even ordinary rešection gives usgrounds for suspicion. We know that desire must settle to some extentfor us to be able to act, but we also know that it is possible, indeed usual,for us to act on the basis of limited rešection. In general, people can tellus to some extent what they are doing and why. But, if called up shortfor a full accounting, it is typical for people’s accounts of their own de-sires to trail off, perhaps pointing vaguely in some direction.

Aristotle’s argument seems designed to intrigue his readers. He in-vites us to rešect on the absurdity of the idea that desire does not have anend, yet he also insists that it is mysterious what that end might be.Mysterious, yet of the greatest practical importance: “Will not the


11 E.N. I.4, 1094b27–95a11; 1095b2–13.12 E.N. I.3, 1095a10–11.

knowledge of it have a great inšuence on life?” Indeed, it seems thatAristotle is tempting us when he invokes the image of the archers. Theimplication seems to be that his inquiry will provide us with that dis-tant mark that up until now we have lacked. If so, it would seem thatAristotle wants to have it both ways. He wants to keep us at a safe, per-haps complacent, distance from anxiety; but he also wants to suggestthat without this knowledge we are missing something of the greatestimportance for our lives.

Suppose Aristotle had brought us precisely to this point of the argu-ment—and then just left us here. Wouldn’t he have brought us into aposition that he just declared absurd? That is, we would be desiringeverything for the sake of something else (a something else that wecould not yet specify because it purportedly lay just at the horizon of ourunderstanding, but we hadn’t yet been given the mark).

Imagine a courageous person who had not yet engaged in much eth-ical rešection—that is, an ideal member of Aristotle’s audience. Such aperson, when asked why he did something, would say, “because it wasthe right thing to do.” He may, of course, be able to say more about whatbravery is, what are the pleasures and dangers involved, but he wouldn’tbe trying to justify or explain his bravery by referring to some desireoutside of his bravery. In other words, he would be lacking that distantmark that Aristotle’s ethical rešection purports to be about to intro-duce. But then it would seem that the effect of introducing this distant,important, but as-yet-unknown mark is to open the virtuous person tothe possibility of anxiety. For he is now being invited to understand hisaction in terms of the good—the archer’s mark that has thus far onlybeen mentioned, not yet shown. Of course, being virtuous, he will notfeel anxious: anxiety is not a possibility he will take up. But to see thatthe impact of the argument is to introduce anxiety as a possibility,imagine Woody Allen getting this far in the argument, and then beingleft by his teacher to his own devices: “Wait a minute, you’re telling methere’s some distant mark in terms of which all of my actions will or willnot make sense—and now you want to leave?!” On the surface it looks asthough Aristotle is about to provide us, the virtuous, with some ulti-mate reassurance for the lives we are already living. But if he is about togive us that, the fact that we don’t yet have it must mean that, at themoment, we are lacking something important.

Aristotle thinks he can turn to politics to give us a glimpse of thearcher’s mark. To complete the passage begun above:


Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great inšuence on life?Should we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be morelikely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline atleast, to determine what it is and of which of the sciences or capacityit is the object. It would seem to belong to the most authoritative artand that which is most truly the master art. And politics appears tobe of this nature; for it is this that ordains which of the sciencesshould be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens shouldlearn and up to what point they should learn them; and we see eventhe most highly esteemed capacities to fall under this; e.g. strategy,economics, rhetoric; now politics uses the rest of the sciences, andsince again, it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are toabstain from, for the end of this science must include those of theothers, so that this end must be the good of man. For even if the endis the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems atall events something greater and more complete both to attain andto preserve; for though it is worth while to attain the end merely forone man, it is Šner and more godlike to attain it for a nation or forcity-states. These, then, are the ends at which our inquiry, beingconcerned with politics, aims. (E.N. I.2, 1094a22–b11)

This passage is more problematic than it appears. First, this is the onlycase in which Aristotle tries to cite the end via the art, science, or capac-ity that is directed toward it. In every other case, it is the other wayaround. Architecture, for example, is the craft directed toward buildinghouses, buildings, monuments. In politics, by contrast, we do not knowwhat the good is ahead of time. Rather, Aristotle points to the inclu-siveness of politics to suggest that the good, whatever it is, must be in itspurview. Is this reversal a symptom?

Second, Aristotle is trying to reassure us that we have some actualgrounds that there really is such a good. After all, we do have politicianslegislating; the polis is the arena in which meaningful human activityoccurs, and legislation does help shape that activity.13 But if we look toactual activity, politics gives us little grounds for hope, and stronggrounds for pessimism. Isn’t Aristotle writing in the wake of the Pelo-ponnesian War? In the aftermath of Socrates’ death? It seems hardlylikely that Aristotle was unaware of Plato’s claim, put in Socrates’mouth in the Gorgias, that if the good is the end of politics then Socratesis the only true politician.14 But if that is so, the claim “we’ll know whatthe good looks like when we watch the activities of real politicians”


13 See Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, pp. 15–16.14 See Plato, Gorgias, pp. 515–21.

turns into “we’ll know what the good looks like when Socrates runs thestate.” We might as well wait for pigs to šy. The seeming appeal to theactual to justify the claim loses its force.

Third, the question of the political is deferred. I do not believe thatany previous scholar has noticed that, if translated properly, the last lineof the Nicomachean Ethics is identical with the last line of Portnoy’s Com-plaint: “So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”15

Here is the revised Oxford Translation:

Now our predecessors have left the subject of legislation to us un-examined; it is perhaps best, therefore, that we should ourselvesstudy it, and in general study the question of the constitution, in or-der to complete to the best of our ability the philosophy of humannature† Let us make a beginning of our discussion. (E.N. X.9,1181b12–23)

In other words, in the closing lines of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotleadmits that any serious political study of the good has gone unexaminedby his predecessors and it is only now time for him to begin. But at thebeginning of the Ethics it was precisely political activity that was sup-posed to reassure us that there was a supreme good at which one mightaim.

Even in the opening paragraphs of the Ethics, Aristotle seems im-plicitly to recognize that it is hard to tie his subject-matter down. “Letus resume our inquiry and state…” (I.4, 1095a14); “Let us, however,resume our discussion from the point at which we digressed” (I.5,1095b14); “Let us again return to the good we are seeking, and ask whatit can be” (I.7, 1097a15); “but we must try to state this even moreclearly…” (1097a25). From a psychoanalytic point of view, there is al-ways a question: why does a person keep coming back to something?What is it about the previous attempts that, for Aristotle, remains un-satisfying? Why does he feel the need to try again? Why can’t he just saywhat he means, be done with it, and move on?16


15 Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1967).16 I do not want to hang anything in the argument on this, but one might note in pass-

ing that it is precisely here that Aristotle launches an explicit attack on his philosophical fa-ther: “We had better consider the universal good and discuss thoroughly what is meant byit, although such an inquiry is made an uphill one by the fact that the Forms have been introduced byfriends of our own. Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed to be our duty, for thesake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are philoso-phers; for while both are dear, piety requires us to honor truth above our friends” (E.N. I.6,1096a11–16; my emphasis). One might wonder: why the need to appeal to truth and pietyto justify an aggressive attack?

3.

Aristotle seems conŠdent that he can Šll in the gap:

Let us resume our inquiry and state, in view of the fact that allknowledge and choice aims at some good, what it is that we say po-litical science aims at and what is the highest of goods achievable byaction. Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general runof men and people of superior reŠnement say that it is happiness, andidentify living well and faring well with being happy; but with regardto what happiness is they differ, and the many do not give the same ac-count as the wise. For the former think it is some plain and obviousthing, like pleasure, wealth, or honor; they differ, however, from oneanother—and often even the same man identiŠes it with differentthings, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor; but,conscious of their ignorance, they admire those who proclaim some greatthing that is above their comprehension. Now some thought that apartfrom these many goods there is another which is good in itself andcauses the goodness of all these as well. To examine all the opinionsthat have been held would no doubt be somewhat fruitless: it isenough to examine those that are most prevalent or that seem to havesome reason in their favor. (E.N. I.4, 1095a14–30; my emphasis)

Aristotle, following Socrates and Plato, wants to argue that the value ofour values is that they lead to and constitute a happy life. Of course,there is much to be said about this conception of happiness, but ratherthan follow Aristotle down that interpretive path, I should like to ask atangential question: what is he doing when he introduces happiness atthis point? I shall explore this question at length. But let me say rightaway that I think that Aristotle is performing a seduction in the psy-choanalytic sense of the term.

Obviously, this needs explanation. To understand this claim I needto distinguish, Šrst, a vulgar from a sophisticated sense of seduction;and, second, within the sophisticated sense of seduction, I need to dis-tinguish a manifest from a latent content. By a seduction in the vulgarsense I mean the blatant sexual intrusions that Freud, before 1897,thought neurotics had been subjected to in childhood and had re-pressed.17 Although Freud abandoned the so-called seduction theory, anumber of psychoanalytic thinkers have tried to reŠne that theoryrather than abandon it, in the hope of holding on to a more sophisti-


17 See, for example, the Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-logical Works of Sigmund Freud (S.E.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1981), vol. 2.

cated truth.18 In this more properly psychoanalytic account of seduc-tion, there is recognition that even in healthy relationships betweenparents and child there are transmissions of unconscious messages.These are experienced as messages, but they are necessarily enigmatic.Precisely because these messages escape our understanding, they capti-vate us: and this moment of captivation is, from a psychoanalytic pointof view, inevitable. In this sophisticated sense, seduction is constitutiveof our entry into language.

Basically, we have just seen the manifest content of seduction. Weare by our natures susceptible to enigmatic signiŠers—oracular utter-ances, if you will, which we can recognize as having a meaning—in-deed, as having a special meaning for us—but whose content we do notunderstand. But the latent content of seduction is the idea that there isan explanatory end-of-the-line, an Archimedian point of explanationbeyond which one does not need to go. Freud originally thought that hecould stop his explanatory-analytic quest when he traced a neurotic’sstory back to a real-life seduction. It was as though the simple appeal toreality—this reality—could be the explanatory end-of-the-line. It washere, Freud thought, that the restless mind that searches for explana-tions can come to rest.

In abandoning the seduction hypothesis, Freud did not abandon theidea that children were often seduced or abused; nor did he abandon thehypothesis that such seduction caused serious psychological harm.What he abandoned—at least, according to his own conscious under-standing—was the idea that this happened always and everywhere inthe causation of neurosis. The deeper idea, though, is the recognitionthat the mind is always active. In particular, it is always active in thecreation of fantasies. Thus even when there is a real-life, blatant seduc-tion, there is still a further question: what did the mind do with it? Therecognition that the mind is active in producing fantasies of seduction istantamount to the admission that there is no Archimedian point, no ex-planatory end-of-the-line in a brute appeal to reality.19

We are now in a position to call Aristotle a seducer. He injects a spe-cial use of an enigmatic signiŠer into our lives and he puts it forward assomething that ought to be an explanatory end-of-the-line. Verbally,


18 Most notably Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, and “The UnŠnished Coper-nican Revolution.” Compare Hans Loewald, “Primary Process, Secondary Process and Lan-guage,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 184–91.

19 I discuss this interpretation of the seduction hypothesis in Open Minded: Working Outthe Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), ch. 2.

Aristotle says, there is very general agreement that the good is “happi-ness,” but there is widespread disagreement about what happiness is.The agreement, then, seems only about a word—and about the placesuch a concept would hold in our lives, if only we could give it content.There is thus also general agreement that this would be a justiŠcatoryend-of-the-line, but there is at the same time a recognition that no onecan say with conŠdence what this valuable condition consists in.

This seems to be the point of ethical rešection. The injection of“happiness” here does capture our attention. We seem to be seeking “thegood,” and we are on a path of inquiry that we already recognize as at-tractive to us, but we do not yet have a clear idea of what this attractionis. Aristotle has already said that if we had knowledge of the good, thatknowledge would have a great inšuence on our lives. We can recognizenow, before we have it, that we would be much better off with thisknowledge than without it. He now identiŠes this good with our hap-piness: something we can recognize as an ultimate good before we reallyknow what it is. Doesn’t this heighten anticipation, exert some pressure onus to know? If we are creatures who desire our own happiness, and ifhappiness is attainable only through rational action (that is why animalscannot be said to be happy), then the injection of the idea that we canconsider the happiness of our lives taken as a whole must serve to make usdiscontent. Even the virtuous person will feel, as Aristotle would put it,the “right amount” of discontent. For once this idea of happiness hasbeen introduced, it must, as Aristotle himself recognizes, instill a long-ing to Šnd out what it is.

Aristotle distinguishes the judgment of the many from the judg-ment of the wise. Now if we again remember the gift of the twentiethcentury to philosophy—the insight that there can be no fundamentalgap between the content of our concepts and the life we live withthem—it becomes clear that the use of “the many” cannot simply be amistake about happiness. It must reveal something about the content ofthe concept of happiness. The use of “the many” reveals, Šrst, that “hap-piness” is systematically inconstant. People use it to designate whatthey don’t yet have, what they are longing for, that which they have justlost and would like again. People tend to fantasize that if they just hadthis missing thing, it would make them happy. Thus, as Aristotlepoints out, the sick man longs for health and thinks that if only he canbe healthy again he would be happy. In his sickness, he is oblivious tothe thought that it would be a sign of his regaining health that he turns


his attention to something else that is missing and begins to fantasizethat it would give him happiness.

Now there is supposedly a perspective—the perspective of “thewise”—from which once can see the fantastic nature of this longing.Nevertheless, the use of “happiness” is irretrievably entangled in thatfantasy. Happiness is that which we would attain if our deepest longings(of the moment) were satisŠed.

Second, the use of “the many” reveals that they are to some extentaware of their ignorance. “They admire those who proclaim some greatthings above their comprehension.” The many are ready to fall in lovewith a pronouncement they do not understand. It seems to be intrinsicto our use of the concept of happiness that we are especially vulnerableto seductions invoking it.

But these features of the use of “the many” suggest that “happiness”is a perfect transference concept. It is a blank that holds a place for “thatwhich would satisfy our deepest longings” (whatever they happen tobe). Thus, in retrospect, one can see how Aristotle could use the conceptto carry out a seduction. Aristotle asks, what is the good of all our ac-tions? It seems that we have somehow to take our lives as a whole intoaccount, to do so while we are still in the midst of living and somehowto answer what to do next on the basis of that consideration. There is noobvious way to do this. In effect, Aristotle takes the concept of “happi-ness” from its unrešective home—where, for instance, we call the richhappy when we are poor, and in general fantasize that if only we couldget…, we would be happy—and places it in a rešective context inwhich it is not yet clear how it is to be deployed.

This claim requires explanation. Obviously, there had long beenspeculation and comment on what made for a happy life.20 What Aris-totle is injecting is the idea that we can somehow be sensitive to thegood—the happiness of our whole lives—in every decision, every ac-tion, every practical deliberation. The problem is that we don’t yetknow what this sensitivity is, nor what it is that we are supposed to besensitive to. In effect, there is an enigmatic signiŠer already circulatingin the population—our “happiness”—and Aristotle, following Socratesand Plato, tries to inject a new use. The idea that there is a special useof “the wise” promotes the fantasy that there is already content to theconcept, but that it is only perceivable by those who are in the know.


20 See, for example, the account of Solon’s visit to Croesus in Herodotus, The Histories,book I (New York: Penguin Books, 1972).

The seductive suggestion is that a very special, esoteric knowledge isneeded. This is just how it looks when an enigmatic signiŠer is intro-duced: it will look like there is something mysterious and enticing and,if only we could get behind the veil, our lives would be, well,…happy!

4.

Aristotle now purports to Šll in the blank. The good of each activity, hesays, is “that for whose sake everything else is done.” So “if there is anend for all that we do, this will be the good achievable by action.”21 Aris-totle says that he is going to state “even more clearly” what this goodis—and he does go through the motions of giving its marks and fea-tures—but there is an important sense in which he says nothing. Con-sider, Šrst, Aristotle’s claim that the good is complete.

Since there are evidently more than one end, and we choose some ofthese (e.g. wealth, šutes and in general instruments) for the sake ofsomething else, clearly not all ends are complete ends; but the chiefgood is evidently something complete. Therefore if there is only one com-plete end, this will be what we are seeking, and if there are morethan one, the most complete of these will be what we are seeking.Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more completethan that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else,and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else morecomplete than the things that are desirable both in themselves andfor the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call complete withoutqualiŠcation [��s � ��] that which is always desirable initself and never for the sake of something else. (E.N. I.7, 1097a25–34; myemphasis)

Aristotle does not here tell us anything about what happiness is actuallylike. To say that the chief good is complete is basically to utter a tautol-ogy. It secures a logical space of an enigmatic signiŠer: something thatholds the place for “the end of desire as such.” But this laying out of thelogic of an enigmatic signiŠer tends to obscure the fact that this space isitself created. For there is some sense in which Aristotle’s fundamentalclaim is false: we do “choose” happiness for the sake of being able tolive a life in which we conceive of it as forming a coherent whole. This


21 E.N. I.7, 1097a18–23; my emphasis.

“choice” isn’t made, so to speak, inside life: it is, rather, the kind of in-augurating instantiation that gives life an inside. Once we have in-stalled the idea of there being an end of all the things we do, life willthereby be so transformed that it will appear that there is (and alwayshas been) such thing as a life having its own possible coherence and end.It will then appear that all possible choices occur in this Šeld: within thecontext of a life. This is an indication that we have already been seducedinto a certain way of life, a way of life that has been structured by the in-troduction of an enigmatic signiŠer into it.

Aristotle makes a similar move with the idea that happiness is self-sufŠcient:

From the point of view of self-sufŠciency the same result seems tofollow; for the complete good is thought to be self-sufŠcient† theself-sufŠcient we now deŠne as that which when isolated makes life desirableand lacking in nothing; and such we think happiness to be; and furtherwe think it most desirable of all things, without being counted as onegood among others—†(E.N. 1.7, 1097b5–17; my emphasis)

One should read this, I think, as the utterance of a fantastic tautology:the imagining of the logical space that happiness would have to occupy.Happiness is that—whatever it is—which makes life desirable andlacking in nothing. That is, happiness is that, whatever it is, whichmakes us happy.22 Now, why do I call this tautology fantastic? Becausealthough it is possible to make perfectly good sense of this claim, onecan also see, just below the surface, the stirrings of a wish. After all, whyformulate the condition of self-sufŠciency in terms of a life lacking innothing? It is a condition of life that we live with desires—and the expe-rience of desire is the experience of a certain kind of lack. In a happy life,presumably, we have the right sorts of lacks and are able to satisfy themin the right sorts of way. But to characterize such a condition as a lifelacking in nothing hints at the idea that the truly happy life is somehowbeyond lacks—that is, beyond desire. The hint is of a life that is beyondthe exigencies and pressures of life itself. The fantasy of a happy life be-comes tinged with the suggestion of a life beyond life—a certain kind ofliving death. I shall return to this.

Aristotle himself seems to recognize that he has not yet said any-thing substantial:


22 I owe this happy turn of phrase to Gabriel Richardson.

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems aplatitude and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This mightperhaps be given if we could Šrst ascertain the function of man.(E.N. I.7, 1097b22–25)

What the translator calls a “platitude” is �� : strictly,“a certain same-saying.” I do not think it a stretch to translate Aristotlethus: “to say that happiness is the chief good seems a tautology.” (“Tau-tology” literally means a same-saying.) Aristotle himself recognizes thathe is not making substantial claims about either happiness or the goodbut is rather laying out the structure of a certain kind of concern. Thisisn’t simply a platitude, nor is it simply something that is agreed upon(another possible translation): it is rather the delineation of the logicalspace that any candidate for the title “happiness” would have to occupy.But he has not yet said anything about the occupant.

Now when Aristotle at last comes to his famous argument about thefunction of man, it looks as though he might at last be adding some con-tent to the idea of happiness. But appearances can be deceiving.

There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rationalprinciple† Now if the function of man is an activity of soul in ac-cordance with, or not without, rational principle…the humangood turns out to be activity of soul in conformity with excellence,and if there are more than one excellence, in conformity with thebest and most complete. (E.N. I.7, 1098a3–17)

Hasn’t Aristotle at last given us the content of happiness? I don’t thinkso. Nothing of substance is added by bringing in the idea of rational ac-tivity. “Happiness” is the placeholder for the object of our concern whenwe take our whole lives into account (whatever it might be to do that).The rational principle here is nothing other than the intelligent, mind-directed approach to happiness (whatever that might be). But that isonly to stake out the conceptual Šeld in which happiness is placed. Aris-totle himself says that we do not consider any of the other animalshappy.23 This is not because they are psychologically incapable of it, butbecause the concept has been introduced as the goal of a thoughtful ap-proach to living well, taken as a whole. Again, Aristotle is doing noth-ing more than locating the place in which the enigmatic signiŠer mustoperate.


23 E.N. I.9, 1099b32–1100a1.

“But we must add,” says Aristotle, “‘in a complete life.’ For one swal-low does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or ashort time, does not make a man blessed and happy.”24 This is the realtransformation: the injecting of a concept into life that purportedlystands to our whole life as the good stands to any activity within thatlife. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the introduction of thisconcept raises conceptual problems that Aristotle has difŠculty in re-solving.25 Can we call no man happy while he is alive? This is not just amatter of clearing up confusions, or brushing away sophistries. The in-jection of an enigmatic signiŠer carries with it the possibilities of con-tradictions, unworked-out problems.

Is it only the dead we can call happy, Aristotle asks, as being beyondmisfortunes and reversals? But, he goes on, that would be absurd be-cause we consider happiness to be an activity. And yet, he continues, “itis odd that when he is happy the attribute that belongs to him is not tobe truly predicated of him because we do not wish to call living menhappy, on account of the changes that might befall them†”26 This isa serious problem for Aristotle—and he has no real answer. He does of-fer certain empirical consolations: that the virtues are the best way tokeep one’s balance when misfortune threatens and that, even in misfor-tune, one can never become base. But there is no conceptual clariŠca-tion. And this would suggest that there is no answer: it would suggest,that is, that we are not here dealing with an articulated concept knownonly to “the wise” but with an enigmatic signiŠer.

Aristotle even manages to get himself puzzled about how far the“concept” of happiness extends: can a person’s happiness be affected af-ter he is dead? The familiar point made by commentators is that theGreek conception of happiness is not coincident with our own. The lessfamiliar point is that this “concept” is not tied down. Notice how tenta-tive Aristotle is:

That the fortunes of descendants and of all a man’s friends should notaffect his happiness at all seems a very unfriendly doctrine, and oneopposed to the opinions men hold…and it makes a differencewhether the various sufferings befall the living or the dead…orrather, perhaps, the fact that doubt is felt whether the dead share inany good or evil. For it seems, from these considerations, that even if


24 E.N. I.7, 1098a18–20.25 See E.N. I.10.26 E.N. I.10, 1100a34–b1.

anything whether good or evil penetrates to them, it must be some-thing weak and negligible…at least it must be such in degree andkind as not to make happy those who are not happy nor take awaytheir blessedness from those who are. The good and bad fortunes offriends, then, seems to have some effects on the dead, but effects ofsuch a kind and degree as neither to make the happy unhappy nor toproduce any other change of kind. (E.N. I.11, 1101a22–b9)

Now it may seem “unfriendly” to hold that the misfortunes of lovedones will in now way affect the recently dead, but who says death isfriendly to our wishes? Again, this may run counter to the opinions ofmost people, but is there any topic about which one should have lessconŠdence in “the many” than in their beliefs about what happens afterdeath? Aristotle cannot here be trying to get to the truth about happi-ness. At best, he can be working out the content of common belief. Aris-totle does in general think one should consult common opinion—forabout features in this world people do tend to grab onto some aspect of re-ality, even if they do so in a distorted form.27 But it is obvious that aboutlife after death, “the many” know nothing. In consulting common opin-ion on this subject one learns about cultural myths and fantasies; onelearns nothing about the happiness of the dead. But this is all right ifAristotle is not trying to Šnd out the truth about happiness, but is facil-itating a seduction. For he is taking powerful and widely held wishesabout happiness and claiming that these wishes can legitimately attachto the enigmatic signiŠer he is introducing.

Aristotle goes through the motions of “testing” his argumentagainst common beliefs:

We must consider it, however, in the light not only of our conclusionand our premises, but also of what is commonly said about it: forwith a true view all the facts harmonize, but with a false one theysoon clash. (E.N. I.8, 1098b9–12)

On the surface this look like a kind of empirical conŠrmation, testingone’s position in the light of hypotheses that others hold. However,when it comes to popular beliefs, we have seen that Aristotle has alreadycut his cloth to Št current fashion. For the rest, he does no more than lo-cate the logical space in which this enigmatic signiŠer is placed. Aris-totle admits as much himself: “we have practically deŠned happiness as asort of living and faring well.”28 Similarly with the claims that it is a


27 See, e.g., E.N. I.8, 1098b9–12.28 E.N. I.8, 1098b20–22.

kind of excellence, that it is itself pleasant and among the most godlikethings.29 Thus far we know practically nothing about happiness. But,ironically, knowing practically nothing is essential to seduction.30

5.

Note that Aristotle’s remarks thus far have all the hallmarks of an inter-pretation—at least, according to one understanding of that term. Itlooks as though Aristotle is saying to his audience, “Look, this is whatyour life was already about. You might not have consciously understoodthat you were aiming toward happiness, but now that I’ve given you thisinterpretation you can take better practical hold of your lives.” Thus itlooks as though Aristotle is just passing onto us a piece of knowledge—something that was already true but about which we were ignorant.That is precisely what an inaugurating instantiation will look like—if itis successful. Aristotle has already said that rešective understanding ofthe good will change our lives in important ways. But, from the perspec-tive of the later Wittgenstein and Heidegger, there is no coherent way tounderstand the idea of changing our lives with a concept in fundamentalways while holding the content of that concept constant.

In fact, it is arguable that Aristotle is striving for nothing less than


29 E.N. I.8–9, 1098b30–99b17.30 In this context, note the way that Plato chooses to end the Symposium:

At that point, Aristodemus said, Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and some others among theoriginal guests made their excuses and left. He himself fell asleep and slept for a longtime (it was winter, and the nights were quite long). He woke up just as dawn was aboutto break; the roosters were crowing already. He saw that the others had either left orwere asleep on their couches and that only Agathon, Aristophanes, and Socrates werestill awake, drinking out of a large cup which they were passing around from left toright. Socrates was talking to them. Aristodemus couldn’t remember exactly what theywere saying—he’d missed the Šrst part of their discussion, and he was half-asleep anyway—butthe main point was that Socrates was trying to prove to them that authors should be able to writeboth comedy and tragedy: the skillful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet. He was about toclinch his argument, though to tell the truth, sleepy as they were, they were hardly able tofollow his reasoning. In fact, Aristophanes fell asleep in the middle of the discussion,and very soon thereafter, as day was breaking, Agathon also drifted off. (Plato, Symposium223b–d, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruf [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989])

In other words, Socrates dramatizes a scene in which there is nothing left but an enigmaticmessage. Everyone has left or fallen asleep, there is no one left who can reconstruct the argu-ment—and yet we feel that the message is crucial and somehow matters to us. Is there anychoice but to create an interpretation? To understand the torrent of writing, thinking, in-terpretation that this seduction brought forth is to understand much of the history of West-ern literary criticism.

an ontological transformation of human being. To see this, let us startwith Heidegger’s idea that we are ontologically constituted by care. Tosee that this is more than a deep psychological fact about us, considerthe following counterfactual schema:

If we were to cease to care, then…

The point is not that all counterfactuals of such form are false, but thatthey are all nonsensical.31 We see this when we recognize that the an-tecedent is not specifying any coherent condition. In the closest condi-tion in which we cease to care, “we” cease to be. No doubt, one can Šndhuman beings in psychiatric institutions in severe catatonic states, inmassive autistic enclosedness, where it does make sense to say that theyhave ceased to care. But precisely in looking at this allegedly limitingcase we can see what is at stake: in ceasing to care, they have ceased to beone of us. This is not to draw a line between one tribe and another, oneculture and another: it is to gesture in the direction of what it is to fallout of human being. The “fact” that we care, then, is not simply an im-portant fact about what we are like, it is a structuring condition of theuniverse of our possibilities.

Now it seems that Aristotle is trying to get us to recognize that weare in a similar position with respect to:

If we were to cease to care-about-our-happiness, then…

First, Aristotle insists that humans are the only animals capable of hap-piness. Other creatures may šourish in their distinctive ways, but onlyhumans can be concerned about their happiness—and this concernseems to be a constitutive condition of happiness itself.32 It seems thatAristotle is here trying to make an ontological distinction: he is map-ping out the realm of human being. Second, Aristotle explicitly sees allforms of human being as various types of carings-about-happiness. In-deed, for Aristotle, one differentiates among these forms of being not bywhether there is a concern for happiness or not, but over what form thatconcern takes. The virtuous person, for example, is harmoniously moti-vated in ways that accurately express and promote his happiness.Among people who suffered conšicts, Aristotle recognizes two types.


31 I discuss a related point about our mindedness in “Transcendental Anthropology,” inOpen Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul.

32 E.N. I.9, 1099b33–1100a1; see also X.8, 1178b24–2.

First, there is the “continent” person who feels a conšict but in the endmanages to do the right thing. Second, there is the “incontinent” (orakratic) who decides to do one thing, but then acts against his best judg-ment. This is Aristotle’s model of an irrational act. But both the “conti-nent” and “incontinent” persons have it in common that their conšictsare among things they take to be goods. Temptation is the paradigm oc-casion for conšict, but whether or not one gives in, both sides of theconšict are directed toward some image of happiness. The wicked or in-temperate person is the mirror image of virtue: he is pursuing some badend—but only because he (mistakenly) believes it will promote his hap-piness. In short, for Aristotle, all forms of human being are structuredby this concern.

This apparent universality of this concern helps Aristotle remain un-aware of his ontological sleight of hand. For by introducing the idea thatwe are ontologically constituted by a concern for our happiness, he in ef-fect slips in the idea that we are ontologically constituted by a concernfor our lives as a whole. This does seem an unconscious attempt at mak-ing-true. For it is precisely the concern for our lives as a whole thatserves to make our lives whole. And it is by introducing “happiness” asa way we might evaluate our lives as a whole, as a purported evaluativeframe for our current understanding of what we are doing here and now,that life gets to be constituted as a whole. And insofar as Aristotle takesconcern-for-our-happiness to structure all the possibilities of human be-ing, he has endeavored to change our ontological constitution withoutnoticing that this is what he is doing.

That, it seems to me, is the unconscious aim of Greek ethical rešec-tion: to change our ontology without our noticing it. Thus we see thepower of a certain form of interpretation: not just to change life, but tochange the structure of possibilities in which life can be lived.

6.

In analysis, we are always interested when the analysand makes a sud-den shift. And there is no doubt but that there is an abrupt shift in thelast few pages of the Nicomachean Ethics—a shift that changes the mean-ing of the book as a whole. Had those pages not been there, the obviouslesson of the book would be that the happy life is the active life of thetraditional ethical virtues informed by practical wisdom. But Aristotlefamously closes the Ethics by claiming that, in fact, such a life would


only provide “second-rate happiness.”33 The truly happy life is contem-plative.

Generations of scholars have reacted in one of two ways. First, theyhave tried to show that the appearance of a shift is only an appearance.They point to hints earlier in the text and argue that contemplation isthe direction in which Aristotle has been moving all along.34 Second,philosophers who are interested in the contemporary value of an Aris-totelian approach to ethics will tend to split off the end of the book anddiscount it. It is treated as part of Aristotle’s theology: of historical in-terest but not relevant to the central ethical approach of the book. Thesephilosophers focus on Aristotle’s account of how virtues are instilled byhabit and how they bestow their own distinctive ways of seeing and re-acting to situations.

I don’t want to move in either direction, for both seem to me to bethe work of philosophy’s ego. Not that I have anything against the egoper se. It is of value to show an underlying unity to the NicomacheanEthics taken as a whole. But it is precisely the ingenuity of displayingthis underlying unity that covers over the strain in doing so. Similarly,it is of course of value to use Aristotle as inspiration for contemporaryapproaches to ethics, but the beauty and excitement of that activity cov-ers over the violence involved in lopping off a signiŠcant section of thebook.

I should therefore like to try a change of tack. Leaving aside thequestion of the ultimate coherence or incoherence, I want to stay closerto the surface of the text and ask: what is the effect of this apparent dis-ruption? What is involved in this last-minute recognition that the trulyhappy life is the contemplative one? The answer seems to me surprising.Just below the surface of the familiar arguments, the text serves to pro-mote discontent and to valorize death.

7.

If the Nicomachean Ethics had ended at book X, chapter 6, the openinglines of the text would, in retrospect, have looked like a come-on. Why,after all, would we need an image of archers given a distant mark to aimat if the upshot of ethical rešection is that the life that we are already liv-ing is the happy one? The metaphor would be wildly off. A more appro-


33 “��s,” E.N. X.8, 1178a9.34 See, e.g., E.N. I.5, 1095b14–96a5; I.9, I099b11–18; I.12, 1101b21–31.

priate metaphor would be the adding of a bit of mortar between the al-ready-secure bricks of the solid ediŠce. But the introduction of the idealof a contemplative life does at last give us a mark to aim at, for it does in-volve a shifting of sights onto that mark. At the last minute, we are en-couraged to think differently about the lives we are already leading. Weare now encouraged to see them as pointing elsewhere.

The shift is in our conception of what it is about our life that reallygives it value. And this will lead to a restructuring of our lives. Not thatthe contemplative life is altogether different from the practical life, butnow that large part of life that is engaged in practical activity will beunderstood from inside that life as aiming toward the contemplativelife.35 That is, such a practical life, when it succeeds in its project, will be acontemplative life. For a contemplative life is not one in which we arealways contemplating. Rather, what makes the life contemplative is,Šrst, that practical life itself is understood as organized for the sake ofproviding time and space for contemplative activity; second, the practi-cal activity of life is actually successful in securing room for contempla-tion; third, it is understood that it is this contemplative activity thatgives this life its deepest value. The move from a practical to a contem-plative life will involve a rethinking of the value and organization ofpractical life.

It is crucial to Aristotle’s restructuring of ethical life that “happi-ness” has been functioning for him as an enigmatic signiŠer. He begins:

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonablethat it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and thiswill be that of the best thing in us. Whether it be intellect or some-thing else that is this element which is thought to be our naturalruler and guide and to take thought of things noble and divine,whether it be itself also divine or only the most divine element in us,the activity of this in accordance with its proper excellence will becomplete happiness. That this activity is contemplative we have al-ready said. (E.N. X.7, 1177a12–18)

Aristotle seems to be pursuing a thought to its logical conclusion, butnote that this is possible because we do not yet know what happiness is.It has been introduced as a standard, yet because it is enigmatic we aresusceptible to a last-minute shift in understanding what the point of ourlives might be. It is the ethical equivalent of receiving an oracle and onlyat the last minute coming to understand its meaning for us. Aristotle, ofcourse, relies here on an overall teleological framework, and he appeals


35 See Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, on the central good; pp. 26–27.

to “the best thing in us.” The effect, though, must be to set us at a dis-tance from happiness. For let us just suppose that we are the intendedaudience for these lectures: we are already well brought up, mature,more or less leading an ethically virtuous life and are now followingAristotle in a rešection on that life. Until this moment we ought to havebeen thinking that we are already living happy lives; but now comes themoment of separation. We begin to realize that the lives we have beenliving are not completely happy. So, although we are at this moment thefurthest away from “the many’s” conception of happiness, this highestconception of happiness does have something in common with the low-est: we are again conceiving happiness as what we don’t at the momenthave. Aristotle will achieve this distance by retrospectively giving newcontent to what is meant by “complete happiness.” And because we havealready been seduced by the enigmatic nature of this signiŠer, there ispressure to go along.

Aristotle now argues that whatever the hallmarks of happiness are,one gets more of them in a contemplative life. Contemplative activityis, he says, more “continuous” and “self-sufŠcient” than ordinary practi-cal activity.

And the self-sufŠciency spoken of must belong most to the contem-plative activity. For while a wise man, as well as a just man and therest, needs the necessaries of life, when they are sufŠciently equippedwith things of that sort the just man needs people towards whomand with whom he shall act justly, and the temperate man and thebrave man and each of the others is in the same case, but the wiseman, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the betterthe wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he has fellow-workers,but still he is the most self-sufŠcient. And this activity alone wouldseem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the con-templating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart fromthe action. And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy thatwe may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace. Now the ac-tivity of the practical excellences is exhibited in political or militaryaffairs, but the actions concerned with these seem to be unleisurely.Warlike actions are completely so (for no one chooses to be at war, orprovokes war for the sake of being at war; any one would seem absolutelymurderous if he were to make enemies of his friends in order to bring aboutbattle and slaughter); but the action of the statesman is also unleisurely,and—apart from the political action itself—aims at despotic powerand honors, or at all events happiness, for him and his fellow citi-


zens—a happiness different from political action and evidently sought as be-ing different. So if among excellent actions political and military ac-tions are distinguished by nobility and greatness, and these areunleisurely and aim at an end and are not desirable for their ownsake, but the activity of intellect, which is contemplative, seemsboth to be superior in worth and to aim at no end beyond itself, andto have its pleasure proper to itself (and this augments the activity),and the self-sufŠciency, leisureliness, unweariedness (so far as this is possiblefor man), and all the other attributes ascribed to the blessed man are evi-dently those connected with this activity, it follows that this will be the com-plete happiness of man, if it be allowed a complete term of life (for none ofthe attributes of happiness is incomplete). (E.N. X.7, 1177a27–b26;my emphasis)

As an empirical claim, it is dubious that the contemplative manneeds others less, for he needs society to make possible the leisure condi-tions in which he can contemplate. But as a logical point, the just mannecessarily acts in relation to others; the contemplative man acts on hisown. What matters for us is the shift in value toward this solitary activ-ity, for it represents a shift away from the idea that the ethical virtues aretheir own reward. The practical virtues are now said to offer some levelof gain apart from themselves. And this, in effect, opens up a possibilityfor discontent within an ethically virtuous life. Had Aristotle not for-mulated the theoretical difference between practical and impracticalactivity, there would be no room for this discontent. But once contem-plation is isolated from other forms of mental activity, the thought be-comes available that only it is loved for its own sake, for nothing arisesfrom it other than itself. Aristotle is now Šlling in a meaning for theenigmatic “self-sufŠcient.” If we have been following Aristotle step bystep, we already committed ourselves at the beginning of the inquiry tothe idea that “happiness” is “self-sufŠcient.” This is, as it were, our eth-ical oracle. Now in the closing pages of the Ethics, we purportedly Šndout what we have all along been committed to. Quite literally, we Šndout what the meaning of our life ought to be. And, at the same moment,most of us will discover that our lives fall short.

In this way, valorizing the contemplative ideal is tantamount to in-troducing a source of discontent within ethical life. We were lured intoethical rešection by the promise of a distant mark that, as archers, wecould aim at. And, true to his word, Aristotle does give us a mark by


which we might reorient our sense of an excellent life. But this suggeststhat the practical virtues themselves encourage a rešection that ulti-mately leads to the conclusion that they are there for the sake of some-thing beyond themselves. In other words, the life of practical virtue haswithin itself the possibility for generating its own sense of discontent.

For this reason, the Nicomachean Ethics is not as complacent a docu-ment as it is often taken to be. It is by now a familiar claim that Aris-totle’s ethics articulates the values of an aristocratic class; and while thismay be true, it overlooks the discontent that is being built into the out-look. So, for example, the point is often made that the theorist of mas-ters will of course valorize leisure—and the activities that can only becarried out in leisure time. This may be an accurate political criticism,but, from a psychoanalytic point of view, life itself tends to be experi-enced in terms of various forms of pressure. According to Freud, thevery Šrst forms of mental activity—the hallucination of the absentbreast under conditions of rising tension—is a fantasy of what it wouldtake to be released from this pressure. Human-mindedness, at its heart,is constituted by various fantasies of release from the pressure of life. Ineffect, Aristotle takes up this longing and tries to incorporate it into ateleological framework. Nonleisured, busy activity is now interpretedas for the sake of leisure. This introduces a source of discontent for thenonleisured life—and it does so by structuring a fantasy. What hadhitherto been experienced as the contentless pressure of practical life isnow explained as that from which we would be released if only we couldattain a contemplative state.

To be sure, Aristotle does say that the life of practical virtue is ahappy one. But one does not understand that life properly, nor does onelive it properly, unless one experiences it as pointed toward contempla-tion. That is, if one does not understand one’s life as so oriented, onecannot attain the highest form of happiness—at best, there is second-rate happiness. But as soon as one does understand one’s life in this way,there is also the recognition that, most likely, this second-rate happinessis as good as it gets. The political life at its highest does have a certainnobility, but once this higher form of happiness has been introduced,the political life is now seen as aiming beyond itself. This is an exampleof how one can become ensnared in enigmatic signiŠers. At the begin-ning of the inquiry we were invited to agree that “happiness” was “com-plete” and “self-sufŠcient” though we had little understanding of whatany of these terms might mean. They seemed together to articulate a


logical structure of teleological striving. But now a new conception ofhappiness is introduced in relation to which the political life, even at itsbest, is now revealed as “incomplete,” as not really “self-sufŠcient.”

Aristotle is explicit that now that the vista of a contemplative lifehas opened up, the life of practical virtue appears “second rate”:

But in a secondary degree the life in accordance with the other kind of excel-lence is happy; for the activities in accordance with this beŠt our hu-man estate. Just and brave acts, and other excellent acts, we do inrelation to each other, observing what is proper to each with regardto contracts and services and all manner of actions with regard topassions; and all of these seem to be human† The excellence ofthe intellect is a thing apart; we must be content to say this muchabout it, for to describe it precisely is a task greater than our purposerequires. It would seem, however, also to need external equipmentbut little, or less than moral excellence does. Grant that both needthe necessaries, and do so equally, even if the statesman’s work is themore concerned with the body and things of that sort; for there willbe little difference there; but in what they need for the exercise oftheir activities there will be much difference. The liberal man willneed money for the doing of his liberal deeds, and the just man toowill need it for the returning of services (for wishes are hard to dis-cern, and even people who are not just pretend to wish to act justly);and the brave man will need power if he is to accomplish any of theacts that correspond to his excellence, and the temperate man willneed opportunity; for how else is either he or any of the others to berecognized? It is debated, too, whether the choice or the deed is moreessential to excellence, which is assumed to involve both; it is surelyclear that its completion involves both; but for deeds many things areneeded, and more the greater and nobler the deeds are. But the man who iscontemplating the truth needs no such thing, at least with a view to the exer-cise of his activity; indeed they are, one may say, even hindrances, at allevents to his contemplation; but in so far as he is a man and liveswith a number of people, he chooses to do excellent acts; he willtherefore need such aids to living a human life.

But that complete happiness is a contemplative activity will appearfrom the following consideration as well. We assume the gods to beabove all other beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actionsmust we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not the gods seem ab-surd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so on? Acts of abrave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks because it isnoble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give? It will bestrange if they are really to have money or anything of the kind. Andwhat would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise tasteless,since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through them all,


the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy ofgods. Still every one supposes that they live and therefore that theyare active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now ifyou take away from a living being action, and still more production, what isleft but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpassesall others in blessedness, must be contemplative, therefore thatwhich is most akin to this must be most the nature of happiness.(E.N. X.8, 1178a9–b22; my emphasis)

If one looks at the overall movement of thought (and emotion) fromthe beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics up until this moment, one cansee the structure of a trauma. According to Freud, trauma has a retro-spective structure.36 In the typical scenario that Freud Šrst envisaged,a child has an experience—a seduction—that at the time she cannotunderstand. Nevertheless, a trace of the event is laid down in memory.Only later, as the child develops, is there another experience that trig-gers a retrospective understanding of the meaning of the earlier experi-ence. But this new understanding cannot be assimilated: it wounds themind that was on the verge of understanding it. On this model, neitherof the two experiences is traumatic in and of itself. The earlier experi-ence need not have been traumatic when it occurred because it was reg-istered, but not understood. The later experience, for its part, can beinnocent in itself—as, for instance, the experience of mild sexual arousalin a situation that triggers a reminiscence of the earlier occasion. Whatbecomes explosive is the cocktail of both those experiences.

Now the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics is like the stage ofchildhood seduction. Ethically speaking, we are children when we be-gin. As the intended audience, we have been well brought up and are, soto speak, well disposed toward virtue. But we do not yet understand themeaning of our ethical habits and dispositions. We do not yet reallyunderstand our own character. In this sense, the Nicomachean Ethics is thebeginning of an ethical rešection on who we are. It is at this point thatAristotle installs a number of enigmatic messages to us: that our lives asa whole are directed toward “happiness,” that there is “the good,” “theend of all the things we do,” and that happiness is “complete” and “self-sufŠcient.” There is no way at the beginning of inquiry that we canunderstand what these messages mean. And thus they must have a cer-


36 See the Project for a ScientiŠc Psychology (S.E. I.350–59); Laplanche, Life and Death inPsychoanalysis, ch. 2. See also J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis(London: Hogarth Press, 1983): “Deferred Action,” pp. 111–14.

tain oracular appeal for us: drawing us into this inquiry, yet puzzlingand intriguing us.

The bulk of the book is then taken up with an exploration of the eth-ical life—the life organized around and giving expression to the tradi-tional ethical virtues. Aristotle sometimes calls this the “political life”because the highest expression of such a life would be that of the states-man organizing, legislating, and running the polis. This is our ethicaladolescence. And it is here that the trauma occurs. Aristotle said in bookI that the proper statesman would have to have his eye on the good, for itis his job to organize the polis so as to promote it. Indeed, as we haveseen, Aristotle rather preposterously claims that we should look to theactual activities of statesmen to get some idea what he means by “thegood.” But if the highest expression of ethical life is the statesman actu-ally legislating for the good, he has to know what he is legislating for.And it is at this point of rešection that ethical life suffers a trauma. Forwe Šnd that the “meanings” laid down in ethical childhood come to ac-quire meaning in the course of ethical development that the ethical lifecan no longer contain.

Aristotle has seduced us into discontent with the ethical life as such.It is now seen as yielding, at best, a kind of “second-rate” happiness.This is what Freud would call a compromise-formation. We are toldthat the ethical life is still a happy one, but there is now a discontent-inducing qualiŠcation. At the beginning of the Ethics, as he delineatesthe marks and features of “happiness,” Aristotle says, “but we must add:in a complete life”—and he takes up the problem of reversals and mis-fortunes in life. The consolation he offered was that the virtuous personwas the best equipped to keep his balance—he better than anyone elsewould be able to tolerate the reversal without losing his happiness. Butnow what we have at the end of the Ethics is a kind of intellectual rever-sal. If the ethically virtuous person really is good at keeping his balance,then he ought to take this occasion to shift his life from an ethical life toa contemplative one. If he cannot do so, he will be able to retain his hap-piness, but he cannot help but realize that it is second-rate.

In effect, Aristotle is recommending a different level of homeostasisfor the best human life. That is, instead of living one’s entire life at thelevel of a practical engagement with the world, that engagement shouldnow be seen as aiming at producing a surplus that makes leisure pos-sible—and thus makes possible the activities appropriate to leisure.This transformation, in which practical activity is now seen as aiming


beyond itself, turns practical activity into busyness. Again, it is familiarto give a political critique of this move: a theorist of the master-class willtry to valorize leisure activity. But from a psychoanalytic point of view,there is a deeper, inchoate urge that is getting expressed in a speciŠc for-mulation. Psychoanalytically speaking, any form of life will tend to gen-erate a fantasy of what it is to get outside that life. This is because life isexperienced, consciously and unconsciously, as being lived under pres-sure—and it is correlative to that experience that there is a fantasy ofrelease. Thus it is to be expected that as soon as ethical life gets concep-tualized as such—as soon as we can experience such a life as forming alife—there will tend to be fantasies about what it would be like to get out-side. Aristotle formulates a speciŠc instance of such a fantasy—Šlling itout in teleological and aristocratic terms—but the fantasy has the gen-eral structure of promising true happiness just outside the “conŠnes” inwhich we ordinarily live. In this sense, “the wise” have returned at atheoretical level to the view of “the many.” The many, you will recall,thought, when they were sick, that happiness lay in health, when theywere poor, that happiness lay in wealth. Now we Šnd that the ethicallyvirtuous think that real happiness lies in contemplation.

The idea of a contemplative life is a powerful organizing fantasy—one that tends to hide its fantastic status. After all, one might think, thecontemplative life is a real possibility—indeed, Aristotle must havethought that he was living such a life. Why, then, call this a fantasy?This is an important question, and it deserves a layered response. But, inthe Šrst instance, I want to claim that this question itself helps to coverover the fantastic nature of the contemplative life. That is, the very factthat a contemplative life could actually be lived makes it seem like it isnot a fantasy. But the question of whether or not something is a fantasyis not answered by whether one can act on it. Some fantasies one can acton, others not. The real issue is what motivations get organized and ex-pressed by the fantasy. What we need to look at is how life gets reorga-nized by the insertion into it of the ideal of a contemplative life.

The ideal of a contemplative life involves, as we have already seen, areorientation of the meaning of that life. Consider an ethically virtuousperson, in the midst of his life, who has just sat through Aristotle’s lec-tures. That is, someone who has just gotten to the point where we arenow. What he must realize at the end of the semester that he could notrealize at the beginning is that there is now a completely transformedmeaning to “…in a complete life.” At the beginning of the semester he


could think: “I am already living a virtuous life. If I can just keep this upthroughout my life I will have led a complete, happy life. And there isno better guarantee that I will be able to continue to lead such a life thanthat I already am leading such a life. Already being virtuous is the bestguarantee I could have that I will be able to go on in the same way.” Butby the end of the semester, he has to think: “If I only go on living in thisway, I will have achieved at most second-rate happiness.” So a source ofdiscontent has been injected into the ethical life. He now will reorienthis life so as to aim for contemplation. Before he achieves the leisuretime in which to contemplate, he cannot know for sure that the occasionwill ever arise. Thus his ethically virtuous life must be lived with a cer-tain amount of hope, expectation, and uncertainty. Of course, being vir-tuous, he will experience these emotions in moderation, but they will bethere. And even when he achieves the leisured occasion for contempla-tion—and experiences the highest form of pleasure and happiness—hemust recognize that such occasions as these will be short-lived com-pared to the rest of his life.

To be sure, Aristotle is talking about the happy life. And a contem-plative life is a contemplative life even during the stretches within itthat one is not contemplating. It is the entire life that is the happiestlife. Fine. The real issue, though, is the lived content of this happiestlife. Aristotle explicitly says that the lived moments of contemplationare both more pleasant and overall better than the noncontemplativemoments of a contemplative. life. So even in the best and happiest hu-man life, most of the moments of that life will be lived with the realiza-tion that what ultimately makes that life the happiest and the best arepassing moments within that life. And even in those best and happiestmoments of the best and happiest life there is room for the thought thatthis is a šeeting part of one’s life.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, this is all just as well. If con-templation were a state that one could achieve and just stay there in-deŠnitely and unproblematically, then Aristotle would have been led tofeel discontent within it—and he would start to fantasize a real happi-ness that lies just outside. The beauty of contemplation as a candidatefor occupying a special place of longing is, Šrst, that, for Aristotle, it isthe teleologically highest form of activity. Second, it is all but inac-cessible for most people, even the ethically virtuous. Third, those fewwho do manage to Šnd time to contemplate will experience that timeas precious and short-lived. As if to drive the point home, Aristotle


emphasizes that even if one is living the best and happiest human life itfalls short of the gods, who get to contemplate endlessly and eternally.

But [the contemplative] life would be too high for man; for it is notin so far as he is man that he will live so, but in so far as somethingdivine is present in him; and by so much as this is superior to ourcomposite nature is its activity superior to that which is the exerciseof the other kind of excellence. If intellect is divine, then, in com-parison with man, the life according to it is divine in comparisonwith human life. But we must not follow those who advise us, beingmen, to think of human things, and being mortal, of mortal things,but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal and strain everynerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us, for even if it be smallin bulk, much more does it in power and worth surpass everything.This would seem, too, to be each man himself, since it is the author-itative and better part of him. It would be strange, then, if he were tochoose not the life of himself but that of something else. And whatwe said before will apply now; that which is proper to each thing isby nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore,the life according to intellect is best and pleasantest, since intellect more thananything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest. (E.N. X.7,1177b26–78a8; my emphasis)

I don’t think it takes much imagination to see Aristotle saying thatthe happiest life has a smidge of disappointment built into it. Againthere are the two sides of the same message. In contemplating we join inthe activity of the gods; in contemplating we fall short of their activ-ity.37 That we must “strain every nerve” suggests it is a real effort to getoutside the ordinary conditions of life—even the ethically virtuous life.And in the very process we are reminded of our own mortality. In rela-tion to the gods, we do not have a sense of gloriŠed participation withthem (or: do not only have a sense of that) but also of the overwhelmingdistance that separates our contemplative activities from theirs. Inachieving the ultimate human happiness we thereby become aware ofthe Šnite and limited nature of that happiness.

There is, though, at least the guarantee that within life we will al-ways have something to strive for. In this way, the contemplative idealgives meaning and shape to our experiences of discontent. It gives ashape to desire: and a guarantee that we will always stay at a certain dis-tance from the ultimate object of our desire. Thus the basic experienceof pressure in being alive is given a certain kind of shape and meaning.


37 See also E.N. X.8. 1179a22–32: the double-edged message continues.

It has a shape that promises some escape from the pressure of life, whileat the same time ensuring that the fantasy will always be in place to ex-plain the continuing experience of discontent that is life itself.

All this would suggest that Aristotle implicitly recognizes that thetrue human happiness involves keeping happiness at a safe distance. Itshouldn’t be too far away or we’ll get discouraged, but if it gets too closewe’ll start to feel some discontent with it and fantasize another happi-ness, lying just beyond the current horizon. And in placing true happi-ness just beyond the horizon of the ethical life, Aristotle introduces alack into that life. Something is now experienced as missing from it. Sothe function of the idea of a contemplative life, from a psychoanalyticpoint of view, is not, as presented, to give us an end state that whenachieved will Šnally give us true happiness. Rather it is to give us a fan-tasy for our present use: something we can aim for from a distance. No-tice that we began the Ethics with Aristotle introducing a gap intoethical life. Ethical rešection is inaugurated with Aristotle’s injection ofthe enigmatic signiŠer “happiness.” An inquiry was then launched intowhat that “happiness” could be. By the end of the inquiry, though, weclose that gap with a gap. The answer to the question “what is happi-ness?” is that it is a “something” that lies outside the ethical life itself.Now the point of the ethical life is to get outside it. And given thatcontemplation is praised for being the most solitary and ultimate self-sufŠcient human activity, it is hard to resist the conclusion that, forAristotle, the fundamental good of ethics is to get as far away from one’s neigh-bors as possible. The less one has to do with them the better! Even in themidst of ethical life, its real value, when correctly understood, is thatsomeday it will allow one to get away from it.

8.

But what is this getting away from it all? Looked at from a certainangle, it looks as though Aristotle is valorizing death. At least, amongthe activities of life, he valorizes the one that comes closest to a fantasyof being in a deathlike state. First, it is an image of an escape from thepressures of ordinary practical life. It is what we would do in our bestleisure time, and as such it is the ideal of what one does in a kind ofexistential Sabbath.38 It is a higher form of activity than that of the


38 Cp. E.N. X.7, 1177b5.

nonleisurely practical life—and thus it is what we would do when wehave gotten beyond life (as it is ordinarily lived). Second, contemplationis the activity of the gods: thus it is in itself a deathless activity. Butdeathless activity is precisely what the dead do: only the living engagein activities that come to an end. When Aristotle tries to think throughwhat the gods do, he immediately eliminates all practical activities: allthe fulŠlling of needs or desires, all busywork. But for gods to be godsthey must be active: so Aristotle needs to focus on an activity that isn’titself the practical Šlling of a need. in other words, if one wants to holdonto the bare idea of liveliness and activity but take away from that ideaas many marks and features of actual life as lived, one ends up with con-templation.39 Contemplation is the most deathlike form of life. Thus itis that, imaginatively speaking, immortality is a form of death: it iswhat death would be like if death were a form of life. For death is ourimmortal condition. Note that Aristotle stresses that contemplation isour most “continuous” activity, allowing the least interruption, that itis our most solitary and self-sufŠcient activity, and that it is complete inand of itself. If death were an activity, it would be like that.

At just this point in the argument, Aristotle reiterates a point he hasmade earlier: that other animals cannot be happy.40 These are creatureswho cannot take their lives as a whole into account, and thus cannot rea-son practically about the happiness of their lives. In other words, theycannot take their deaths into account: and their inability to take theirdeath into account is intimately tied to their inability to be happy.

This, I think, sheds light on the value of our values. By this stage ofrešection, it seems that, for Aristotle, the value of our rešection on thebest life is that it induces a kind of being-unto-death. It creates a fantasyof a release from the ordinary pressures of ethical life, a fantasy of shar-ing with the gods the greatest, stressless pleasure. This is a fantasy thatcarries within it an experience of lack, an experience of being at a dis-tance from this wonderful goal. It is a fantasy of release that helps us or-ganize and direct our ordinary practical lives. Those who know mostabout human life know that what is best is to organize life so as to escapeits ordinary conditions—even the conditions of excellence within it.What is best about being human is the opportunity to break out of be-ing human. Or: to be most human is to break out of the ordinary condi-tions of human life.


39 See, e.g., E.N. X.8, 1178b20ff.40 E.N. X.8, 1178b24.

9.

If Aristotle were the Aristotle with whom we think we are familiar, wewould expect the Ethics to end with a summing up of all that has been ac-complished in the text. We Šnd no such thing: “are we to suppose thatour program has reached its end? Surely, as is said, where there are thingsto be done, the end is not to survey and recognize the various things, butrather to do them†”41 In fact, we Šnd an Aristotle who seems some-what irritated, saying that the real work is only about to begin.

As book X, chapter 8, ends, we are in a position to draw the follow-ing conclusions. First, most people are not and will never be happy; sec-ond, even the elite who lead an ethically virtuous life achieve onlysecond-rate happiness; third, those few who are able to lead a contem-plative life will at best be able to contemplate for relatively short peri-ods of their lives. In brief, happiness by and large eludes the humancondition. Humans may long for it in the way they long to win the lot-tery—and, in fact, the mass of humankind has a better chance of win-ning the lottery. At least with the lottery every ticket has an equalchance; for the mass of humankind the very possibility of happiness isruled out at birth (or shortly thereafter). Those who are not luckyenough to be born into a situation in which they can be well brought uphave no chance.

All the rest of animal nature is basically able to fulŠll its nature un-problematically. There will be occasional mutants and occasions whenthe environment doesn’t cooperate, but, for the most part, each speciesis able to šourish in its distinctive way. It is only humans who have acharacteristic problem of failing to thrive. For humans, happiness is hu-man šourishing, yet happiness by and large eludes them. Thus by in-jecting “happiness” as the organizing goal of human teleology Aristotlemanages to disrupt the teleological structure itself. For he has made itvirtually impossible for humans to fulŠll their nature. Although theteleological worldview is used to give content to what happiness con-sists in, once the picture is Šlled out it puts pressure on the teleologicalworldview itself.

Aristotle tries to save his teleology by a šight to aristocracy. “Themany,” he says, are not swayed by good arguments42—this is to beexpected by now—but Aristotle now suggests that even if they had


41 E.N. X.9, 1179a34–b2.42 E.N. X.9, 1179b10–80a5.

been brought up under good laws, they would still need to be tightlycontrolled by law throughout their lives. In other words, it is not simplya matter of their not having been well brought up to begin with.

But it is surely not enough that when they are young they should getthe right nurture and attention; since they must, even when they aregrown up, practice and be habituated to them, we shall need laws forthis as well, and generally speaking to cover the whole of life; formost people obey necessity rather than argument, and punishmentsrather than what is noble. (E.N. X.9, 1180a1–5)

This is the teleological irony of aristocracy. On the surface it looks likethe expression of a teleological worldview that only the best should livein the best way. Yet this position also expresses, as it covers over, ananomaly in the system: namely, that the human race is the only speciesin nature where almost all of its members are failing to šourish. Thisdisruption of the harmonious order is caused precisely by the introduc-tion of “happiness” as the purported concept by which we should evalu-ate our lives. It is usually assumed that it is because Aristotle was anaristocrat that he was attracted to such a teleological worldview. Thequestion now arises whether to hold onto his teleology he had to be anaristocrat.

But even the aristocratic ploy no longer seems to be able to containhis doubts.

…if (as we have said) the man who is to be good must be well trainedand habituated, and go on to spend his time in worthy occupationsand neither willingly nor unwillingly do bad actions, and if this canbe brought about if men live in accordance with a sort of intellectand right order, provided this has force—if this be so, the paternal com-mand indeed has not the required force or compulsive power (nor in generalhas the command of one man, unless he be a king or something sim-ilar), but the law has compulsive power, while it is at the same timean account proceeding from a sort of practical wisdom and intellect.And while people hate men who oppose their impulses, even if theyoppose them rightly, the law in its ordaining of what is good is not bur-densome. (E.N. X.9, 1180a14–24; my emphasis)

The suggestion here seems to be that the compulsive power of law isneeded even for the good. One reason is to contain the hatred a son wouldotherwise feel for his father. According to Aristotle, if a son’s impulseswere not inhibited by an impersonal law, but by his father’s prohibition,


the son would come to hate the father. It no longer seems like happinessis unproblematically available even for those who already are good.

So even those who are constitutionally prepared for happiness, thosewho have been born into the right circumstances and well broughtup—even they would have problems without the law. And yet, the lawdoesn’t yet exist!

In the Spartan state alone, or almost alone, the legislator seems tohave paid attention to questions of nurture and occupations; in moststates such matters have been neglected, and each man lives as hepleases, Cyclops-fashion, “to his own wife and children dealinglaw.”43 Now it is best that there should be a public and proper carefor such matters; but if they are neglected by the community itwould seem right for each man to help his children and friends to-wards excellence, and that they should be able or at least choose to dothis. (E.N. X.9, 1180a24–32)

And surely he who wants to make men, whether many or few,better by his care must try to become capable of legislating, if it isthrough laws that we can become good†

Must we not, then, next examine whence or how one can learnhow to legislate? Is it, as in all other cases, from statesmen? Certainlyit was thought to be a part of statesmanship. Or is a difference ap-parent between statesmanship and the other sciences and faculties?In the others the same people are found offering to teach the facultiesand practicing them, e.g. doctors and painters; but while thesophists profess to teach politics, it is practiced not by any of thembut by the politicians, who would seem to do so by dint of a certainfaculty and experience rather than of thought; for they are not foundeither writing or speaking about such matters (though it were a no-bler occupation perhaps than composing speeches for the law-courtsand the assembly), nor again are they found to have made statesmenof their own sons or any other of their friends. But it was to beexpected that they should if they could; for there is nothing betterthan such a skill that they could have left to their cities, or couldchoose to have for themselves, or therefore, for those dearest to them.Still, experience seems to contribute not a little; else they could nothave become politicians by familiarity with politics; and so it seemsthat those who aim at knowing about the art of politics need experi-ence as well.

But those of the sophists who profess the art seem to be very farfrom teaching it. For, to put the matter generally, they do not even


43 The reference is to Odyssey IX.114.

know what kind of thing it is nor what kinds of thing it is about†(E.N. X.9, 1180b23–81a14)

Now our predecessors have left the subject of legislation to usunexamined; it is perhaps best, therefore, that we should ourselvesstudy it, and in general study the question of the constitution, in or-der to complete to the best of our ability the philosophy of humannature† Let us make a beginning of our discussion. (E.N. X.9,1181b12–23)

In other words: we need proper laws to be good and become happy,but such laws do not exist. No one has really thought about this seri-ously; and neither politicians nor sophists know what they are talkingabout. At the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics we were given conŠ-dence that the good existed by pointing to political science. The goodwas purportedly that which legislators legislate. But at the very end ofthe book this reassurance is taken away. The original appeal was to theactual practice of statesmen in the actual world, but now there is the ad-mission that no one in the actual world knows what he is doing.

From this perspective the beginning of the Ethics looks especially se-ductive. We were lured into a false sense of conŠdence about the good:even if we didn’t know what it was, there were purportedly experts—those in the know—and they were the masters of political science. Butnow that the argument has already secured the conclusion that the trulyhappy life is contemplative not political, Aristotle can kick away theladder. For him the question now becomes how to formulate legislationfor a polis in ways that will keep most people on the right track practi-cally speaking while making room for philosophy among the few.

At this point, a certain question becomes irresistible: does Aristotle’sentire ethical system as it reaches this closing moment Šnally show itselfto be an expression of mourning for Socrates? For in this pessimistic-hopeful vision, society is to be legislated in a way that preserves tradi-tional values but makes room for philosophy instead of killing it off.

For the moment, I should like to take stock of where we have been.We began with a hope—and an approach to an ethical system that is atonce attractive and self-satisŠed. The original hope was that we mightexpand this character- and psychology-based ethics to include an under-standing of the unconscious. But as we start to look at the system from apsychoanalytic point of view, we Šnd that instead of being able to add toit, the system itself starts to fall apart. The Ethics presents itself as part of


a larger teleological system in which everything has its place and every-thing is in its place. What could be more existentially reassuring than tolearn that the ethically virtuous life is the happiest? But now it appearsthat, for humans to be placed in the teleological order, Aristotle had todisturb the order in which they had been living. Following Socrates andPlato, Aristotle disturbs the universe by injecting “happiness” as a pur-ported concept in terms of which one’s entire life can and should be eval-uated. It is only when “happiness” is in place that humans can be said tooccupy a place in the teleological order—but the teleological order can-not account for its own inauguration. The establishment of a teleologi-cal principle—“happiness”—by which to evaluate human life itself liesbeyond the teleological principle.

And while it appears on the surface that “happiness” is a profoundorganizing principle for human life, just under the surface we begin tosee that its injection into life has a profoundly disturbing effect. For al-though it was originally deployed to show that the ethical life was ahappy one, by encouraging us to think about the value of our lives takenas a whole, Aristotle creates the conditions in which it is possible to for-mulate the fantasy of real happiness lying just outside. In this way,“happiness” creates its own discontent. Now Aristotle is too deep andhonest a thinker simply to ignore this pressure, and he tries to contain itwithin the overall framework of his teleological system. But, as I thinkI have shown, it just doesn’t work. The teleological system cannot con-tain the expression of discontent and breaking-out that it itself gener-ates. The question then becomes: how should we understand this dis-content?


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